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| Tim Lovelace (image credit) |
Lovelace has just completed his dissertation, titled "International Legal History from Below: The Civil Rights Movement and the U.S. Origins of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), 1960-1965," which "explores how civil rights activists in the U.S. South informed the development of ICERD, the United Nations’ most comprehensive treaty on race." Here's more:
The dissertation demonstrates that at times, it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand the how the Convention developed without also understanding U.S. racial politics in the early to mid-1960s. Morris Abram, the U.S. expert on the United Nations Sub-Commission for Prevention of Discrimination, and Clyde Ferguson, the U.S. alternate to the Sub-Commission, served as the primary drafters of the Convention, and when presented with the opportunity to draft an international treaty on race, they attempted to create a treaty largely in the image of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Furthermore, the dissertation seeks to contribute to the transnational turn in civil rights studies by detailing the relationship between local activism and international lawmaking.You can get a glimpse of the larger argument in Lovelace's forthcoming article in the Law and History Review.
Lovelace also has a second book project in the works, on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In Lovelace's words:
[T]he book will chronicle the law practices and civil rights activities of a network of attorneys affiliated with the Virginia State Conference of the NAACP. The Virginia chapter was arguably the most successful and best organized, state chapter of the NAACP during the civil rights movement, and African-American lawyers were central to the chapter’s success. While the extant scholarship on civil rights lawyering in Virginia has largely focused on the fallout from the state’s school equalization and desegregation battles, the book will consider the efforts of Virginia NAACP attorneys in a host of often overlooked facets of the freedom struggle—issues such as environmental racism, public health, and human rights advocacy. The book will also explore how the NAACP’s federated structure allowed Virginia’s star-studded, legal team, for better or worse, to play a central role in creating an enduring model for civil rights practice.Congratulations to Tim Lovelace!
